More than half a century after his death in 1953, Jean Epstein remains too much of a prophet without honor in American annals of European film theory and filmmaking. Despite some impressive archival work and several pioneering studies over the last couple of decades, as well as a number of recent reassessments, it is nevertheless correct to say that Epstein's films and film theory figure largely as terrae incognitae on current maps of cinematic achievement, at least in the Englishspeaking world. Many topics must still be pursued in greater depth. A fuller understanding of how Epstein's theories informed his cinematic practice over the course of his three-decade-long career awaits more intensive analyses of many of his films and the circumstances in which they were made. The complex, quite often dissonant relationships his theoretical writings and films sustained with the various European avant-garde filmmaking ventures of his time certainly deserve more concerted attention. A searching exploration of the sinuous course of his later quasi-philosophical reflections on cinema has never really been attempted, while the reason for his marginal position in the shifting intellectual milieus of French film culture since the 1940s remains an important topic for further scholarly investigation. Happily, Epstein's catalogued archive was opened to the public several years ago and, as the present essay collection demonstrates, scholars are now beginning to unpack it for new insights into the work and thought of a man who is as fascinating – though also as elusive – as he is misunderstood and undervalued.

One area in particular that has been too little studied is the relationship between Epstein's earliest intellectual venture, his construction of the poetics subtending the French modernist verse produced by his contemporaries, and his assessment of the capabilities of that newer medium with which he had grown up and to which he would contribute so much: the cinema. In my dissertation, completed thirty years ago, I argued that Epstein's first book on poetry, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui, un nouvel état d’intelligence (1921), the series of critical essays on literature entitled Le Phénomène Littéraire (1921-22), as well as his quasi-philosophical speculations in La Lyrosophie (1922) and other essays of the early 1920s ought to be closely examined because they constituted the basis for his earliest theoretical speculations about film.